This is a unique opportunity to meet more than 20 local authors at one time in one location, in the Pine Patch at the Cottage Book Shop in Glen Arbor (rain location across the street at Bethlehem Lutheran Church). On Friday, Aug. 2 between 2 and 4 p.m. the best of mystery, history, essay writers and artists will gather.
Best known locally as the co-owner with Bob Hesse of Leelanau County’s new Bella Fortuna Restaurant in the center of Lake Leelanau, Jane Fortune, a long-time Leland summer resident, has been working quietly for years to rescue the works of female artists languishing in storage in the more than 40 museums in Florence.
Leelanau writer Kathleen Stocking reflects on her father, Pierce Stocking, who passed away the day after selling his vast tracts of land near Glen Arbor to the federal government. That land is now part of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
When you read about El Salvador being one of the top places on the State Department’s list of places not to visit, you need to buy a pack of cigarettes in Miami just before you get on the plane, even if you don’t smoke. That was my thinking, anyway. Going through Customs in El Salvador was a breeze. The school had sent a former army guy to usher us through and then into a black van which sped through the midnight streets to our school’s housing compound.
The first time I visited the California coast was in 1920. I know, you’re thinking, Wow, I never knew Kathleen was that old. So, let me explain. My father gave me a book for my 10th birthday called, Keeper of the Bees, by Gene Stratton-Porter. The story is set on the California coast of the 1920s where a First World War soldier is in a veterans’ hospital. Told he’s going to be moved to a rehabilitation center, one rumored to be infested with tuberculosis, he leaves the hospital, thinking that if he’s going to die he wants to be surrounded by flowers and the sound of the ocean.
I’m sad to be leaving Amsterdam. Not just because I love my niece and her family and they live here, but because Amsterdam is one of the best places in the world. People are happy here. You only need to walk down the street to feel it. On an overcast winter day with intermittent rain, the buskers in the center of town are playing great music while all around them people are laughing and talking and strolling with their families. You’d think the sun was out.
The Leelanau Press, a nonprofit publishing company, is undertaking a major effort to recognize the work of artists who have painted in this unique northern Michigan gem. A future publication, Art of the Sleeping Bear Dunes, and a major exhibition at the Dennos Museum Center at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City will celebrate what has recently been media-designated as America’s Most Beautiful Place.
Who would have thought that Istanbul would remind me so much of where I grew up above Sleeping Bear Bay? Everywhere you turn there’s a vista of turquoise water; and a pinkish tinge to the light, that I’ve never seen anywhere except on the Leelanau. If I don’t stop and think for a minute, the Bosporus and the Golden Horn, could almost be the Manitou Passage and Pyramid Point.
England isn’t very big. It’s the size of Michigan. And, like Michigan, you’re never more than 60 miles from a view of the water. Six thousand years ago England was a European peninsula. Then glaciers melted, the sea rose, there was a tsunami and Britain became an island.
I was busy teaching in the Peace Corps all year, but school just ended. I’m writing to you on the Fourth of July. It’s weird to be in a place that’s a holiday only for me. I’m thinking of the Fourth of July on the Leelanau Peninsula, the families with their picnics, the bonfires on the beaches, fireworks in the night sky over Lake Michigan, dancing in the park up in Northport. I’m thinking of all the carpenters I know who loaded up their trucks and drove to New Orleans after Katrina.